Terrible Swift Sword (25 page)

Sheridan had ordered Brigadier General Alfred Torbert to deploy his cavalry divisions along a line running southeast from Winchester. Fields and farm buildings were to be burned, livestock destroyed, and slaves set free. “No houses will be burned, and officers in charge of this delicate but necessary duty must inform the people that the object is to make this valley untenable for the raiding parties of the rebel army,” said Sheridan's orders.
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Many Union cavalrymen loathed this duty; they had not gone to war to destroy the life's work of noncombatants. “It was a phase of warfare we had not seen before,” wrote a Pennsylvania cavalryman, “and though we admitted its necessity, we could not but sympathize with the sufferers.”

From a hill, Matthela Harrison counted fifty fires. “The sky was lurid and but for the green trees one might have imagined the shades of Hades had descended suddenly,” she wrote. “Large families of children were left without one cow.”
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A Richmond newspaper reported that the Yankees burned all the wheat, oats, and hay. “They drove before them every horse, cow, sheep, hog, calf and living animal from the country. What the people are to do, God only knows.”
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There followed a six-week hiatus in “the Burning”—the inhabitants' bitter shorthand for the ruthless purging of the Valley—while Sheridan and Jubal Early contended militarily. When it resumed in late September and October, its scope was greatly enlarged.

 

THE BURNING WAS A refinement of an old form of war making—during the 1920s, the Italian Fascists began calling it “total war,” and the appellation stuck. It was an older, crueler warfare that made fewer distinctions than Grant and Sheridan did between soldiers and civilians. Throughout history, examples abound: Rome burning Carthage to the ground during the Third Punic War; Timur's horsemen making pyramids of human skulls during their scorched-earth campaigns of the fourteenth century.

In modern Europe during the Enlightenment, the pendulum swung the other way. Professional armies fought gentlemanly, choreographed battles that generally
excluded noncombatants, except in calculated acts of reprisal—for example, the British army's burning of Washington in retaliation for the Americans' burning of York, Upper Canada's capital. From 1861 through 1864, the Union and Confederate armies had carefully targeted one another, except when battles were fought in cities.

But even Francis Lieber in his 157-article
Code for the Government of Armies in the Field
, written at Major General Henry Halleck's request, had deemed it permissible for Yankee soldiers to seize and destroy Rebel civilian property under certain circumstances. Any citizen of a hostile territory was by definition “an enemy” and might be “subjected to the hardships of war,” the code said. There was wiggle room everywhere. Article 22 stated that unarmed civilians were to be “spared in person, property, and honor as much as the exigencies of war will admit.” One of the code's rare unqualified assertions on the subject of noncombatant civilians stated, “Private citizens are no longer murdered, enslaved, or carried off to distant parts.”
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All of that notwithstanding, for the first time an American army—Phil Sheridan's—was deliberately, systematically destroying an enemy's capacity to fight by targeting its food supply and crushing the fighting spirit of its civilians. With the Lincoln administration's approval, Grant had quietly shelved the three-year-old “gentleman's war” in order to expose the Southern people to hardship and personal loss.

 

SHERIDAN HAD BEEN RIPE for conversion. “I do not hold war to mean simply that lines of men shall engage each other in battle,” he wrote. “This is but a duel, in which one combatant seeks the other's life; war means much more, and is far worse than this. . . . . Death is popularly considered the maximum punishment in war, but it is not; reduction to poverty brings prayers for peace more surely and more quickly than does the destruction of human life.”
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Abraham Lincoln, William Sherman, Grant, and Sheridan shared the belief that prosecuting a total war was the shortest path to peace. By 1864, it appeared to them the only viable path. The Union faced the Manichean choices of union and emancipation or Southern independence and slavery—with no middle ground. Referring to Jefferson Davis, Lincoln wrote in his December 1864 message to Congress, “He cannot voluntarily reaccept the Union; we cannot voluntarily yield it. Between him
and us the issue is distinct, simple, and inflexible. It is an issue which can only be tried by war, and decided by victory. If we yield, we are beaten; if the Southern people fail him, he is beaten.”
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The drift toward total war began in 1863, when Lincoln exhorted his Eastern commanders to focus on destroying Robert E. Lee's army and not on geographical gains, which could be fleeting. A year later, Grant became the first to put this policy into practice by prosecuting the bloody Overland Campaign and by suspending prisoner exchanges, denying the tens of thousands of veteran Confederacy troops.

But killing Confederate soldiers on battlefields and locking up enemy captives indefinitely were slow agents of victory, Grant and Lincoln soon recognized; the war's awfulness must also be carried to the doorsteps of Southern civilians, whose defiance kept the Confederacy alive. This was not just a war of armies; it was a war of cultures, to be fought to the death. Moreover, Lincoln and Grant, like Sherman and Sheridan, also believed that the advent in the South of guerrilla warfare justified their jettisoning the old rules.
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Reasoning within their severe Hobbesian universe, they concluded that by systematically targeting civilian property—unprecedented on the North American continent (except toward Native Americans)—they might psychologically break the enemy, thereby shortening the war and saving lives.

And so Lincoln and Grant chose to sow ruin throughout the enemy homeland, wrecking the South's war industries, despoiling its farmlands, and bringing hunger into the homes of its people. This new guiding principle was never set down as policy, but its outlines were clearly visible in the actions of Sheridan and Sherman. The two would later bring this kind of warfare to a wicked apotheosis on the Great Plains when they wiped out villages of Indian warriors, women, and children in order to stop depredations against white settlers.

 

AS HE READIED THE Army of the Tennessee to march from Atlanta to the sea, Sherman told Grant, “I can make the march, and make Georgia howl.” The march would deliver a powerful psychological blow, demonstrating to the Southern people that the Confederacy no longer could protect them from the enemy. As he later explained to General Henry Halleck, “We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies.”
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More outspoken than Grant and Sheridan on the subject of total war, Sherman was also the first to prosecute it. During the February 1864 Meridian, Mississippi, campaigning, Sherman's troops wrecked railroads, terrorized citizens, destroyed property, cleared out guerrillas, and lived off the land. After the Vicksburg campaign, his men burned homes and villages near Memphis that were believed to harbor guerrillas. “Our duty is not to build up; it is rather to destroy both the rebel
army and whatever of wealth or property it has founded its boasted strength upon,” he wrote.
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Sherman's bombardment of Atlanta in August 1864 provoked strenuous objections from Confederate lieutenant general John Bell Hood for its “studied and injurious cruelty.” Sherman replied, “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. . . . . You might as well appeal against the thunderstorm as against these terrible hardships of war.”
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After Atlanta fell on September 2, Sherman forcibly depopulated the city of all civilians not in essential government jobs. A total of 705 adults, 860 children, and seventy-nine slaves were expelled.

Newspapers throughout the South condemned Sherman's callousness. Sherman justified his conduct as an expedient to remove potential guerrillas from his new base of operations. In his view, guerrillas violated the accepted norms of warfare and must be mercilessly suppressed wherever they were found.

Confederate civilians were enemies, too, Sherman believed. “I am not willing to have Atlanta encumbered by the families of our enemies,” he told Halleck. “I want it a pure Gibraltar.” Sherman, brilliant and sometimes erratic, had a gift for distilling his beliefs into crisp aphorisms.

In October 1864, as Sherman's men began methodically burning depots, shops, factories, foundries, and most of the Atlanta's business district prefatory to leaving on their three-hundred-mile march, the general shared some of his dark musings on warfare with Sheridan. “The problem of this war consists in the awful fact that the present class of men who rule the South must be killed outright rather than in the conquest of territory, so that hard, bull-dog fighting, and a great deal of it, yet remains to be done.” Later, as he led his 62,000-man army across eastern Georgia to the sea, with smoke billowing into the sky in its wake, Sherman explained to Major General George Thomas, “I propose to demonstrate the vulnerability of the South and make its inhabitants feel that war and individual ruin are synonymous terms.”
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SHERIDAN'S VICTORIES AT WINCHESTER and Fisher's Hill in September had wholly reversed the situation in the Shenandoah Valley. As recently as July, Early's army had controlled the upper Potomac River and menaced Washington. Sheridan had sent Early backpedaling sixty miles. As Grant wrote in his congratulatory telegram after Fisher's Hill, “It wipes out much of the stain upon our arms by previous disasters in that locality.”

But Sheridan had not destroyed Early's army. Although hopelessly outnumbered—even more so after Sheridan received 5,000 reinforcements—the Army of the Valley yet remained a dangerous weapon, especially with the return of Major
General Joseph Kershaw's division and the arrival of Brigadier General Thomas Rosser, commanding the Laurel Brigade. The brigade's 7th Virginia Cavalry Regiment had covered itself with glory during Stonewall Jackson's 1862 campaign, and Valley residents hoped that it would once more distinguish itself against Sheridan.
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Early, however, could not count on receiving many more men from Robert E. Lee, straitjacketed by the Army of the Potomac's siege at Petersburg. Tethered to the Petersburg-Richmond area and receiving few replacements for the men lost during the Union Army's Overland Campaign, Lee was unable either to prevent Sherman from rampaging through Georgia or to send Early more than token reinforcements. Grant's siege liberated Sherman and Sheridan to wage campaigns of destruction without Lee's interference.
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REBEL PARTISANS STEPPED UP the pressure while Early regrouped. They laid ambushes and struck without warning, often at night, pillaging supply trains and bushwhacking and killing Union soldiers caught out alone on the roads. The murders of their comrades stoked a hunger for vengeance among Sheridan's men.

From the time Sheridan received Grant's August 17 order to visit destruction upon Loudoun County, he had also quietly carried out another, more sinister program: the cold-blooded killing of guerrillas, wherever he encountered them. “Mosby has annoyed me and captured a few wagons. We hung one and shot six of his men yesterday,” he reported. On August 19, Sheridan informed Grant, “Guerrillas give me great annoyance, but I am quietly disposing of numbers of them.” Three days later, he wrote to Grant, “We have disposed of quite a number of Mosby's men.”
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The thorn in Sheridan's side was John Mosby, commander of the 43rd Battalion, Virginia Cavalry, the partisan ranger unit better known as Mosby's Rangers that had grown to regimental size. In 1864, Mosby was thirty years old; Douglas Southall Freeman describes him in
Lee's Lieutenants
as gaunt, thin-lipped, and “stoop-necked,” with a “satirical smile” and “strange, roving eyes.” Before the war, Mosby, like Early, had been a lawyer who opposed Virginia's secession. When the fighting began, Mosby became a scout for Jeb Stuart, and in 1863 he was given command of the Rangers. The “Gray Ghost”—so nicknamed for his uncanny ability to elude pursuers and melt into the countryside—and his three hundred men were heroes to the Valley's loyal Confederates and to people across the large swath of northern Virginia known as Mosby's Confederacy.

While Mosby's Rangers were the best-known partisans, other bands were led by Harry Gilmer, James Kincheloe, John McNeill, Charles T. O'Ferrall, and Robert White. Even taken together, the various Confederate ranger forays did not materially interfere with the campaigns of Sheridan or Grant. Still they were a needling reminder that the invading Yankees did not completely control the territory they occupied.
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ON AUGUST 18, LIEUTENANT Colonel William Chapman, Mosby's second in command, killed a 5th Michigan Cavalry vedette who fired on Chapman when he demanded the Yankee's surrender. Assuming that partisans had ambushed the trooper, George Custer ordered the 5th Michigan to burn homes near where the shooting had occurred. When Chapman and his men, still in the area, observed thirty Union cavalrymen burning homes, they attacked. A few of the troopers escaped, but twenty-five were trapped and forced to surrender. Under orders to kill home burners, Mosby's Rangers shot all twenty-five prisoners and left their bodies on the ground. The headline of the
New York Times
account of the killings read, “Massacre by Mosby—Rebel Treachery—Cowardly Cruelty.”
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